7.1 Effects and Styles

Hi. Welcome back to Affinity Designer Quick Start. In this lesson, we're going to learn how to use effects and styles in Affinity Designer. If you take a look over in your panels, you'll see that you have an effects panel, and you also have a styles panel. So, the effects panel, allows you to add all kinds of effects to your layers, your groups, your shapes, any item that shows up in your panel. So you have things like shadows, glows, beveling, all the types of things that you might be familiar with from a program like Photoshop. Now we also have a styles panel. Styles can include effects, so they can include drop shadows and things like that but they also include films and they include strike stuff. So we'll just reset our studio panels. And then we'll have a look at some examples of how styles and effects work. So I will just grab a rectangle and draw down. We'll give it a fill color. And let's give it a little bit of noise. We'll give it a stroke. And we'll change the color of that stroke around a little bit. Give that some noise also. So now we've just given fill and stroke styles to this shape. Now let's apply some effects. You can apply effects via the effects panel. So just drag this out. Now the way to apply effects by this panel is to choose the effect that you want and check its box. So we'll plot out a shadow. And then you can work with the settings that you have available here to tweak how the effects looks. Now these settings are actually a limited subset of all the settings that you have available for each effect. So if you want to have access to all the settings, hit this little gear icon. And now you'll have access to extra tools that you didn't have access to via the effects panel. So, we'll increase the opacity of the shadow, give it a larger radius, and just move it around a little bit so we could see it. Okay, so now we have fill, stroke and a layer effect applied to our shape here. Now all of those things comprise the shape's style. And if we want, we can take that style and we can apply it to other shapes that we use in our design. So if we draw out another shape. So that already has the fill that we applied. But just to illustrate things a little bit more clearly. Just change that back. All right, now if I want to apply the style that I have from this shape onto this shape, I can do it very easily by selecting the shape. Pressing Cmd+C to copy. Selecting the new shape. And then pressing Cmd+Shift+V. And I can paste the entire style onto that shape. So it's a very easy way to duplicate styles from one shape onto another as you're going through in preparing your design. Now, if there is a style that you think you're going to be using a lot. Then you might want to save that style up, so it will show up as an option in your styles panel. And to do that select an object that has the style that you want, and then over in the styles panel, hit the little drop down and choose add style from selection. And there's the style that we just created. And you can rename that style by right-clicking on it and renaming it to anything that you need. And from that point on, you'll be able to add that style to any other shape just by clicking on the style that you've created in your styles panel. So just to recap styles include your fill, your stroke and any layer effects. You can copy styles from one shape to another with Cmd+C and then Shift+Cmd+V. You can save styles out into the styles panel. And you can add effects to any item that shows up in your layer panel via the effects panel. In the next lesson you're gonna learn how to set up Affinity Designer to work with your graphics tablet, if you use a graphics tablet. And if you don't, we're gonna learn how you can still achieve similar types of effects using velocity controllers and also manually simulating pen pressure. I'll see you there.